The main goal of the official media has traditionally been not to reveal, but to conceal the facts. When, in 1962, an uprising by workers in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in the south of Russia, was brutally put down by government forces, the media’s role was not to report it. The bloodstained streets were repaved and amateur radio reports were jammed. Discerning readers deduced facts from what newspapers did not say rather than from what they did: omissions were more informative than inclusions. If the media said something did not happen, people understood it to mean the opposite. In later years television played the role of a universal plug that kept the facts from leaking out into the open.
The public was informed about the Chernobyl catastrophe only two days later with an announcement merely twenty seconds long in the evening news on the state television channel. ‘There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people. An investigative commission has been set up.’ People in Moscow saw the announcement as a signal to tune to foreign radio stations which reported that a huge explosion had taken place and a radioactive cloud was moving westwards. But in the nearby town of Pripyat, children were playing football on the streets and sixteen weddings were held outdoors in the epicentre of the accident. Evacuation did not start until thirty-six hours after the catastrophe. On 1 May, while the communist bosses were evacuating their own families, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people attended a May Day parade in Kiev, where radiation levels were eighty times higher than normal. Many came with children in short-sleeved shirts. The lies were all the more pointless since the whole world was aware of what was going on.
Moskovskie novosti, a propaganda sheet, printed in a dozen languages, published an article headlined ‘A POISONED CLOUD OF ANTI-SOVIETISM’. It listed foreign nuclear incidents and harangued the West for stirring anti-Soviet hysteria. ‘Yes, we are talking about a premeditated and well-orchestrated campaign, the aim of which is to soil the political atmosphere in the East–West relationship and to use this poisoned cloud to cover up criminal acts of militarism by the USA and NATO against peace and security.’8
Politically, the cover-up had a more devastating effect on Gorbachev’s reputation than the disaster itself. In the eyes of his two most important constituencies – the Soviet intelligentsia and the West – his pledge to openness and the supremacy of human values failed its first important test. As a transcript of an emergency Politburo meeting shows, Gorbachev himself had limited access to information, which made him furious: ‘We had no information about what was going on. Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. The whole system was penetrated by the spirit of boot-licking, persecution of dissidents, clannishness, window-dressing and nepotism. We will put an end to all this.’9
It was a catalyst for Glasnost – the opening-up of the media. ‘Don’t be afraid of your own people,’ he told his comrades. ‘Glasnost is the true socialism.’10 Gorbachev neither planned nor imagined where the opening-up of the media would lead the country to five years later. He came to give the Soviet Union a new lease of life. But Chernobyl was a bad omen – and the ‘new life’ would turn out to be a short one.
The opening of the media was not as quick and sudden as many retrospectively remember it. Glasnost did not mean a removal of censorship and a sudden burst of the freedom of speech. Nor was it meant to be all-embracing. Glasnost was a limited licence issued to a select few who could target the social groups that were most perceptive to Perestroika – students, young professionals and the urban intelligentsia. The purpose of Glasnost, as Gorbachev understood it, was to inject vitality in socialism. The consequence of Glasnost as Yakovlev saw it was to change the country.
The main medium of Perestroika was print. Two publications were selected for this task of mobilizing the intelligentsia and promoting Perestroika to the world. One was Ogonyok, the odious colour weekly still edited by the old Stalinist playwright Anatoly Sofronov who had led the attack on Tvardovsky and Yakovlev. Ogonyok, which had a circulation of 1.5 million, had one obvious advantage: it was so reactionary and anti-Western that any shift to a more liberal and pro-Western position was immediately noticeable. Yakovlev offered the job of the editorship to Vitaly Korotich, a secondary poet from Kiev who had spoken out about the deliberate attempt by the head of the Chernobyl nuclear station to conceal any information from the outside world.
At the same time as Korotich’s appointment to Ogonyok, Yegor Yakovlev was offered the editorship of Moskovskie novosti (The Moscow News), the propaganda tabloid meant for foreign consumption. It was the oldest English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union and had been started in 1930 by an American socialist to spread the Soviet message to the world. By the 1980s it was published in all the main foreign languages and circulated mostly outside the Soviet Union. As part of the vast News Press Agency (APN) – a propaganda outfit closely linked to the KGB – it was mostly staffed with failed spooks, rogue mercenaries from Arab countries and KGB minders. Its Russian edition, which Yegor was asked to edit, was launched only in 1980 for the Moscow summer Olympics, to advertise Soviet achievements.
Now its task was to advertise and rally support for Perestroika in the West. Yegor was well aware of this task. A year after being appointed as the editor, during which the circulation soared, Yegor told the newspaper’s local party committee: ‘Jointly we have managed to create a newspaper which is read, cited and trusted. [Now] we have a publication which can be used for very important actions/projects in regard to international public opinion.’11 Yegor did not mind being used, for it gave him a chance to use Perestroika and Gorbachev for his own ends. It was the moment for which Yegor and his peers had been waiting for eighteen years.
Moskovskie novosti did not adhere to a Western idea of a newspaper. Fact-based material was still forbidden. The news was not gathered by the newspaper but distributed through the Soviet telegraphic agency TASS. For example, one of the biggest news items of the first Perestroika years – the release of Andrei Sakharov from exile that was splashed across front pages of the international press – in Moskovskie novosti was given forty words at the bottom of page three – a space usually reserved for corrections.
The early Perestroika press was not about reporting, it was about opinion and essay-writing and each one of those pieces was a milestone by which people measured the changes in the country. The most popular page in the newspaper was called ‘The Opinion of Three Authors’, where three public figures – writers, academics, essayists – shared their views on some current topic.
Within a couple of years of Yegor becoming the editor, Moskovskie novosti was the most sought-after newspaper in the Soviet Union. It came out weekly and every Wednesday a long queue of people would start forming outside newspaper kiosks at about 5 a.m. to buy a fresh issue. The print run was still strictly regulated by the Communist Party and limited by the censors, so by 9 a.m. all copies were gone. Those lucky enough to have one in their possession passed the read issue to friends. The unlucky ones read it on billboards outside the newspaper’s offices by the central Pushkin Square. The spot quickly turned into Moscow’s equivalent of London’s ‘Speakers’ Corner’. People did not come to Moskovskie novosti for news in the strictest sense of the word, but to get a sense of the direction in which the country was heading.